September Update

We’ve been making good progress in the last few months, so I thought an update would be
timely. Firstly, a little while back now we had a number of conversations with the Imperial War Museum and, as Lee noted in his post, we now have access to their data. It goes without saying that the IWM are a key resource for the subject of the First World War, so we’re really pleased they’re happy to be involved. You might have spotted we’ve been using their images almost exclusively on our blog courtesy of their non-commercial licence.

A month ago or so Lee implemented the first cut prototype of our API based on the Solr technology. It’s continually being developed and refined, with the most recent version having now been installed on a Mimas server. This isn’t available for public consumption just yet, but will be before too long now.

We sent out a ‘Request For Quotes’ in August for the development of our ‘WW1 Exemplar Project Front end design and interface’, along with some additional information providing recommendations based on the recently published King’s College Report ‘Digital Content for the First World War’. We held meetings with a number of suppliers and have just received their proposals in the last few days. We’ll be looking through these this week.

Given the perhaps better than expected success of our initial Solr API development, we have in the last few weeks been looking to add more data sources from the list provided by King’s College, and we’ve been in touch with a number of additional institutions. There’s not a whole lot of time to bring in more data, but we’ll be doing what we can.